EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
Electronics => Manufacturing & Assembly => Topic started by: ocset on February 15, 2018, 06:20:18 am
-
Hello,
Please help us because we must now scrap our product because the LEDs are going obsolete.
..Our LED lamp product is based on these 63V, 40mA LEDs (SAW09H0A & SAW09A0A)
SAW09H0A
https://www.mouser.com/ds/2/363/SAW09H0A-334993.pdf (https://www.mouser.com/ds/2/363/SAW09H0A-334993.pdf)
SAW09A0A
http://www.seoulsemicon.com/upload2/MJT4040_SAW09A0A_Rev2.0.pdf (http://www.seoulsemicon.com/upload2/MJT4040_SAW09A0A_Rev2.0.pdf)
Unfortunately these LEDs are about to go obsolete. Our boss now says that the entire product will have to be scrapped, because in order to continue it, the optic and LED PCB would have to be re-designed to accommodate whichever new replacement LEDs might be useable. He says that this would cost a massive amount of money, and that therefore the product must simply be scrapped. Is this right? The cost of getting a new optic (arrangement of lenses molded into a transparent Perspex sheet which covers the LEDs) is that hugely expensive?
The following LED could replace the SAW09H0A…..
Luxeon 3014
https://www.lumileds.com/uploads/459/DS208-pdf (https://www.lumileds.com/uploads/459/DS208-pdf)
-
Yay, new treez thread ! :popcorn:
-
Are there any engineers at your company?
-
Unless you can source LEDs in a similar form factor with comparable intensity and radiation pattern, so you can reuse the existing optics with only a PCB redesign, it may be nearly as expensive as developing a new product.
Optical quality injection moulding dies for Acrylic lenses don't come cheap. You've also got to redesign the PCB and fully test it, so you end up having to do most of the work you would for a new product except for the exterior housing design. Also it may be constrained by the limitations of the existing heatsink design, so be inferior to what could be achieved by a new product design with the same development budget and target unit cost.
Unless you have a locked-in large and high profit on-going market for this product , your boss is probably correct that the redesign cant be commercially justified. Its also worth noting that your company's in-house technical/engineering labour pool appears to be over-committed and under-experienced, so diverting resources from other projects to this one is likely to crash the deadlines for the other projects and impact support for field failures, which is likely to seriously impair near to medium-future revenue.
-
Just out of curiosity. Please tell us: Which is it?
http://www.commercial-lighting.co.uk/ (http://www.commercial-lighting.co.uk/)
http://indolighting.com/ (http://indolighting.com/)
http://jw-uk-ltd.co.uk/ (http://jw-uk-ltd.co.uk/)
http://www.lightsoninsouthampton.co.uk/ (http://www.lightsoninsouthampton.co.uk/)
http://sseenterprise.co.uk/ (http://sseenterprise.co.uk/)
So many street lighting manufacturers in Southampton... :scared: :scared: :scared:
-
Are there any engineers at your company?
Not ones that can do their own research. :)
-
In your situation, I would say the exec's had enough drama and is looking for an excuse to drop the product.
Component obsolescence is good for absolving the engineers, marketing, sales etc. for a product that may have been not doing well.
The 4x4mm LED is a common size, Seoul Semi still makes them but not in the high-voltage format SAW09A0A 31V 40mA 185lm. They offer SAW09D0A (http://www.seoulsemicon.com/en/product/High-Power/) 6V 200mA 215lm. Can't see the optics need changing, just the PSU.
Note Seoul Semi is suing Mouser (http://www.seoulsemicon.com/en/company/press/press-release/) for selling LEDS from other manufacturers that they claim infringe upon Seoul's patents. So Mouser may not stock the parts :P
-
Optical quality injection moulding dies for Acrylic lenses don't come cheap.
.
Thanks, -many of our customers dont really know if they want to buy lamps or not….as such they certainly don’t want to spend any significant money at all, and will just disappear if there’s any kind of long-ish lead time.......eg it may be for a company’s outdoor verandas .. where the lamp will hardly be used, if ever at all……..one was a school where they hold a ball for the parents once every year, and the marquee was put in the school field, so they literally needed lamps going down to the marquee site…which get used literally once per year!……….if the lamps skimp on certain reliability features to get rock bottom cheap, then the customers are happy because we give them a 5 year warrantee and they are happy to be sent a replacement should one fail…after all, they’ve got a few months before they need to replace any non-working ones!......so they want something really really rock bottom cheap. Very often they may want to keep an option to redevelop the site……in which case they would tear the lamps down and never use them again . As such, the name of the game in this particular market is “do it cheap, do it small”….and smaller means less space in storage.
Quite frankly, if we offer them one of our all singing and dancing super_mains_transient_withstand , super_efficient_lamps, they really could not be less interested. They just do not want to know.
In this case, I wonder if there is a cheap way of manufacturing a “very general optic” for a multiple LED PCB? A cheap optic which could be used for multiple LEDs.
…ie the light spread would be very imperfect, but perfectly satisfactory for their purpose.
In your situation, I would say the exec's had enough drama and is looking for an excuse to drop the product.
Thanks, i must admit though, that my company has a huge cohort of products out in the field, in some places with zero reject rate after 2 years, and the customers are very very happy. They dont want to go with anyone else but us.
I would confess that from an academic engineering viewpoint, some of our products are hardly the golden egg for a Brunelian engineer.....and engineers dont absolutely clamour to work on this kind of stuff...but many customers love us and love our products....because in many cases ,we give them exactly what they want.
I definetely think that their is often a disconnect between what customers really want and what engineers think they should have.
-
You mean like a piece of frosted glass?
-
I wouldn't even go there. eBay is full of crap, cheap and as-long-as-they-work-are-decent LED lights. Usually those are equipped as crappy as they can be PSU's. LED's with proper heat-sinking and good PSU, lasts decades. But for your post: LED's are easy to change in CAD, all comes down to a price.